I tried this out this week and liked it but really wish this project had some form of auth. Opening the contents of every page you’ve ever visited, even to the local network, is not the best idea.
Hister supports token based, password based, and OIDC/OAuth authentications with optional multi-user handling. Details about user handling can be found here: https://hister.org/docs/user-handling
It also has a "public mode" where anyone can search the indexed content, but only authenticated users can add or modify it.
It seemed like the public mode was the default when I set it up. If so, that’s a fairly dangerous default as keeping a “clean” history with no secrets leaked seems neigh impossible.
The default configuration binds only to localhost, and a fresh installation starts with an empty database/index. Could you clarify which specific attack surface you are concerned about in that scenario?
I’m not concerned about an attack scenario. I’m just saying that using the docker image, if someone (or their agent) isn’t careful, they could expose their browsing history publicly fairly easily. It might just be nice to default to at least a user and pass login rather than just wide open.
Including your AI agents. And models become problematic. There very likely is and/or will be lots of pressure for US AI labs to make models help law enforcement. It could be by implementing backdoors in generated code, or not report some exploitable bugs, or something else. Similar for agents, they basically become the threat in your infra…
(It’s of course not only the US, just that the largest AI providers are US based and we know from history how US agencies operate)
I'm using open weights models on a privacy-focused provider right now, and that's adequate for my current usage, but I'm rapidly getting to the point where my agent's access level to my data (and to a lesser extent, my accounts) is becoming something I'm not comfortable sending outside my network at all.
My hope is that models that are roughly on par with Deepseek V4 Flash can be run on hardware that I can own for <~$5k in the near future. We're close, but not there yet as far as I know.
The only long-term solution to this is self-hosting.
There is literally no protection or difference of an opensource model doing this.
An actual objection I had while talking to an aerospace company was they don't want opensource models because the threat of it having a poisoned training example on specific systems.
It's easily the most hidden malware possible, completely undetectable until an exact set of tokens unlocks it. Is it line 100,543 of your security product? You will literally not know until it plants it in there.
To the best of my knowledge (which, admittedly, is far from comprehensive), that kind of attack on a model shouldn't actually be possible in a deterministic fashion.
If you can't stop them from sometimes telling customers things like "yes, I will give you a penthouse suite at our hotel for only $3/night", why would you be able to guarantee that, with some specific set of tokens, they would produce a perfect and undetectable backdoor customized to the code at hand?
I don’t think it has to be perfect or deterministic that way. It’s enough to have a bias towards implementing a backdoor in some circumstances. Something like, if the machine seems to be used in a Chinese environment, the model is biased towards missing some security issues, or towards implementing the type of bugs that can be used for an RCE, or similar.
You can review generated code manually or with models from a second vendor (ideally from a different country). Attackers would have to poison both and do it in a way that also makes them ignore the planted malware when reading code.
Open models also let you read reasoning traces. That means anomalies would show up when the backdoor activates, like a run of unrelated words or a jump in top token probability. It's only undetectable until the first time it happens.
Along the same lines, you are buying a place. A place that you own and can do whatever you like with. I spent twenty years renting and twenty years of feeling like you can’t hang a picture on the wall, paint a room, upgrade an appliance, or really do anything to improve your surroundings, tends to get tiring.
Not sure, but they likely won't know. Too many people ask permission for things. You'd have better luck doing what big corporations have done for decades. You just do the thing, cover it up, and hopefully never have to ask for forgiveness. And if you DO have to ask for forgiveness, well that's still easier than asking for permission!
I still like this question because of exactly what you mentioned. What the interviewee does and does not mention can give you a fair bit of insight into their priors.
Those are the ones that I learned, from the magic system in Ultima Underworld. I think that H and W are swapped, and that Tolkien's alphabet includes a few more letters. They're both similar to the Elder Futhark runes, if I'm remembering correctly.
Ultima Underworld runes also had a word associated with them, and the words had meaning, which was both amusing when you used them for spells, and iirc could result in experimentation to find new or undocumented spells.
I remember an undocumented spell "Vas Kal Corp" which meant "Great Summon Death" and indeed it does. It ends the entire world and results in a game over.
Bit of an aside but I found it somewhat amusing that one example the author uses of Jim’s financial recklessness was getting into home brewing.
Home brewing is one of the cheaper hobbies available (though like all hobbies you can spend as much as you want). The only real requirements are a bucket and a pot.
Same with a $10k tree slicer, when the actually expensive alternatives that really get people in trouble are day trading, real estate, car collecting, divorce, and starting new businesses that fail.
Bay area housing costs are so expensive that a $10k fancy wooden table starts to look like a reasonably-priced piece of furniture. The expensive thing is the housing square footage to put the table in.
> He lost focus and became reckless. He bought some fancy tree slice table for 10k bucks, got into brewing beer, got a dog, a cat, and overall, went completely over himself financially.
Well, he also mentions getting a dog and a cat in that context. Recklessness is relative I guess.
The cat would certainly agree though I suppose, when it sees that dog walking in the door...
it’s infinitely easier to become an alcoholic by buying alcohol at a grocery store. brewing is pretty much the least direct most delayed gratification way to get drunk. i guess it can be pretty cheap if you optimize for that but it sounds like jim made enough money and high flying friends it’s unlikely to be major factor.
Note: I apologize and rescind my previous comment about not arguing in good faith.
My point isn't that home brewing makes alcohol easier to obtain; clearly it doesn't, as you pointed out.
Rather, it provides a respectable rationale for having a beer (e.g. testing a batch, checking the bottle fermentation, seeing how it pairs with a meal).
Drinking is now part of a productive, interesting hobby. For most people that's harmless, but for a vulnerable individual, the hobby supplies frequent opportunities, a steady supply, and an intellectually respectable reason to consume. That's all.
Though, after you've home brewed the beer, you've now got potentially gallons of beer in a giant pot that you have to bottle yourself. Or you could be lazy and just drink it yourself. True, you could just go down to the store and grab a 30-rack of mass produced beer if you wanted to be an alcoholic, but having a vat of beer in your kitchen that isn't going to drink itself and is gonna go bad if you don't, is a different kind of peer pressure.
You can get handles of vodka for 11 dollars. You can buy listerine for even cheaper and drink that. People brewing their own beer may be alcoholics but they are doing it for the hobby or to customize the flavor. Real down in the throes of addiction alcoholics are not becoming chemists for their fix with how cheap the mass produced stuff is.
If you want to find people doing that you look for the illegal drugs that haven't had wide spread industries drive down the price, like meth.
Kegerators are easy and quite affordable to build.
I absolutely have friends who stopped home brewing because they realized that having a tap of readily available beer in their house wasn't a good idea.
You must not drink or like beer. Brewing something until it ferments into alcohol is the most basic thing ever. There is the very simple problem of taste that is the issue.
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